New Irish Writing: Dead Man Walking by Steve Wade
The winning short story entry for May 2025
Illustration for New Irish Writing by Ellen Connolly
It took him a while to figure it out. Or maybe accept it. But Dave Lawrence got it. There was a reason why no other human had spoken to him in over a week. The same reason those he passed on the streets in town hardly even looked his way. And those that did, just looked through him, beyond him. Not that he cared anymore how people treated him, whether they spoke to him or recognised his existence. That too was part of it. His own indifference to everyone and everything confirmed what had been a slow but growing realisation: he was dead.
OK, he moved about in a 37-year-old body, but this was just a shell, a façade. Absent was the singular identity, his soul, the essence of being alive. The thing that set him apart from all the other eight billion people on the planet. His body doing what it had always done had habit as its driver. So, why didn’t people see his body, his empty shell? Well, they did, he decided, but what their eyes took in didn’t make it as far as their brains. His physical presence acted on them like an instant trance inducer. For how could you see the undead? Something that had dawned on him by degrees. Like that day in the supermarket.
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